Pynch and homosexuals

[Orlowsky at aol.com]

Personally, as one of those rare gay Pynchon readers (and I've never run
across another one either, Gershom), I've never thought of him as homophobic,
any more than I think of, say, my mother as homophobic.  They grew up in a
time when homophobia wasn't the disease, homosexuality was.  The miracle is
that anyone who grew up with that mindset has anything positive to say about
us at all.  Chalk it up to the human potential for growth.

To complain about the negative gay sex scenes in GR is, in my mind, a little
narrow-sighted.  You can look long and far for any sex scenes in GR that are
about loving emotional connections.  Which is why I've always viewed the last
paragraph of p. 616, about the trenches of World War I, as so heartbreaking.
 I've always read that beautiful passage as a lament from Mossmoon about how
in the midst of the chaos of the war, men were able to drop all pretenses and
love each other without fear.  And how that ability to love disappeared with
the comfort of the end of the war, and turned into "idle and bitchy faggotry"
-- sex without love with Scammony.  "No joy, no real surrender."

Whether male-to-male sex in the trenches entered into Pynchon's mind in
writing this passage is irrelevant.  Pynchon was willing to talk
empathetically about men loving each other, practically contemporaneously
with the Stonewall riots.  So Pynch is OK by me, even if I'm just reading
into it what I want to hear.

Every time I read that passage, I think of that beautiful Billy Bragg song,
"Tender Comrade":  

What will you do when the war is over, tender comrade? 
When we lay down our weary guns
When we return home to our wives and families
And look into the eyes of our sons
. . .
Will you say that we were heroes
Or that fear of dying among strangers
Tore our innocence and false shame away
And from that moment on deep in my heart I knew
That I would only give my life for love
Brothers in arms in each others arms
Was the only time that I was not afraid.
. . . 

Bob